Comic Strip Readership [CE-2012-2]

With over 16 million readers in France, comic strips, long considered a minor genre, now enjoy a huge readership there: over three quarters of French people say they have already read comic strips, and over a quarter of these (29%) have done so within the last twelve months. Book publishing has seen an unprecedented boom in this area since the 1990s with the number of titles published constantly expanding, whilst the genres represented within comic books are becoming ever more diverse: in addition to the traditional books, over the last few years there has been an emergence of manga, graphic novels, comics, etc. This study gives an outline of the comic strip readership: overwhelmingly young and male, and with a penchant for reading books and cultural outings; it also points up reading trends within this practice such as re-reading.